Fellow in Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters" 

September – October 2021

Soziale Plastik

The research project ‘Soziale Plastik’ is dedicated to case studies focusing on data visualizations that re-invent, present, and circulate new modes of sharing sustainable experiential knowledge at thresholds of the analog and digital world. The project will examine the role of variously mediated strategies, operating on the principles of sharing resources by the emergence of sustainable networks and the interweaving of creative and social initiatives in local and global contexts with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia. What possibilities for interconnectedness arise through analog and digital practices such as storytelling to share and disseminate experiential and tacit knowledge? 

Which digital tactics are best used to develop and establish networks that are oriented towards sharing sustainable local and global common goods? How does this relate to the western concept of “social sculpture” (Joseph Beuys), intersecting community-based contemporary art and data society? Focussing on exemplary self-initiatives of people who have the same needs, the project supports self-empowerment and collective usage of digital platforms and other devices and analyses how such digital networks build ‘commons’, in which otherwise unavailable resources, instruments of political power, or possibilities of economic and cultural participation are shared and made sustainable. This leads to the question of whether and how these grassroots and creative networks, even more, establish an ‘educational web’ — network-centered, undogmatic, and pragmatic knowledge-production with corresponding modes of social interaction and participation, mobilizing transnational outreach in the process. 

Kim Albrecht visualizes cultural, technological, and scientific forms of knowledge. His diagrams unfold and question the structures of representation and explore the aesthetics of technology and society. Kim is a principal researcher at metaLAB (at) Harvard and a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Potsdam in media theory. As a design researcher, Kim Albrecht explores the boundaries of visual knowledge in the post-digital age. Working and living in Berlin, Kim exhibited, among others, at Harvard Art Museums, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Four Domes Pavilion Wrocław, Ars Electronica Center, Cooper Hewitt, Cube design museum, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Kaestner Gesellschaft, The Wrong Biennial, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, and Kunsthaus Graz.